Essential Oils and Wellness For Your Mind and Body

Dare To Dream Then Do It by John Maxwell Chapter 6

Stay With Your Strengths. John Maxwell’s Rule of Thumb for Successful Work: “Work where you’re strongest 80% of the time. Work where you’re learning 15% of the time. Work where your weakest 5% of the time.” “People working in an area of weakness resent that their best is untapped.”–John Maxwell.

So let’s think for a minute about ourselves and what talents and strengths we posses. What is it that we do and that we do well? What is our weakness? To have a strong team we need to tap into everyone’s different strengths and utilize them. If we are not doing this we are selling ourselves short. So I know for myself that creativity and art is NOT my strength. If it is not for other people’s ideas I would be lost. But thanks to idea books, Google, and Pinterest I look like I may have some type of creativity in me. Truth be told though, I don’t. It is a struggle for me to be creative. As I am typing this I am thinking back to when I did some scrapbooking. I LOVED scrapbooking, or maybe I should say I LOVED the idea of scrapbooking. I however would STRUGGLE to do one page as those around me did MULTIPLE pages. I would complete 1 page in the time they completed 5 pages. I love what the completed books look like and I think that they are amazing but the truth is that if I could pay someone to make the books for me I WOULD LOVE THAT even more. (If there are people that really do that I would like to know). I liked getting together with the different people a couple times a year, but to really think that I was going to accomplish something, was ridiculous because creativity is my weakness. I enjoyed the social time and the time away from my kids (we all need breaks once in a while). But the truth was that most likely I was not going to accomplish a whole lot.

How often in our jobs and in life do we struggle to do things that are our weakness. We are fighting an uphill battle if we continue to do so. We all possess different God given talents, and that is where we are to focus our time and energy. As leaders we need to help our downline recognize their different strengths and utilize them for the advancement of the whole team. Only when we utilize everyone’s strengths will we truly see success. So I love what Monique McLean said in her 21 Days of Prayer. Work your strengths and hire your weaknesses. PERFECT. Stop putting so much energy into the areas that you are weak and start focusing on your strengths. Maxwell states, “Having the right people in the right place is essential to team building.” “The right person in the right place = Progression” “The right people in the right places = multiplication.”

Maybe you are like me and you struggle with knowing what your greatest strengths are. Here are some guidelines for you to follow:

“Get to know yourself and ask others for feedback. Spend time reflecting and exploring your gift.”

“Trust your leader. A good leader will help you start moving in the right direction.

“See the big picture. If your only motivation for finding your niche is personal gain, your poor motives may prevent you from discovering what you desire.”

“Rely on your experience. When it comes down to it, the only way to know that you’ve discovered your niche is to try what seems right and learn from your failures and successes.”

“When you discover what you were made for, your heart sings. It says there is no place like this place anywhere near this place, so this must be the place!”–The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork

This quote hits home for me as well, in that, I don’t feel as though I have a whole lot of talents but that IS OKAY. “The real tragedy of life is not in being limited to one talent, but in the failure to use the one talent.”

So I am going to leave you with putting together the top captions on the pages. What ever your gift/talent is Make the Most of it EVERYDAY!!! Your dreams can become your reality by sticking to what you do best. Start where you are. Success is a process and if you count yourself out by looking too far ahead you will not ever begin. If our only focus is the end prize that seems so far away, we become paralyzed by our fear of failure, and filled with feelings of inadequacy. So don’t forget about our small immediate goals that we need to be making everyday in order to move closer to fulfilling our dreams. And lastly, One thing-and one thing only. All too often we lose focus of our dreams as we are trying to juggle too much. We get distracted by life and the things going on around us. We try to be someone we are not or put so much effort into learning new things and trying to strengthen our weaknesses that we have no time left to do what we were designed to do. So stay focused on what it is that you are good at and use your God given talents to their fullest potential without getting off track and losing focus.

Homework: Start writing down what you think that your God given talent is. Tell me what your God given talent is, I would love to know.

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About blondiesoilbliss

Mother of 4 (3 girls and 1 husband), OB Nurse, Jesus is my leader and the rest of life comes in this order: Faith, Family, Friends, Love for essential oils, and sports!!! I love watching my children compete in sporting events and I am Definitely a competitive person by nature. My husband and I may literally be competitive EVEN with the Alphabet Game………just sayin’